An experiment in poetry
Thanks to my Doctorate in Ministry in Creative Writing at Pittsburgh Seminary
By Katy Stenta
The story gets more fantastic
The more we tell it
It gets bigger
Even when we make it more concise
The better adjective, the simple adverb
The timing
All of which can be
drilled down
to this thing called perfect
But the human being
Exists outside of perfection
There is no perfect time to be human
There is no perfect relationship
No perfect creation
made by human hands
Humankind works so hard to tell its story
Because maybe if we describe our faith
more perfectly, more people will follow it
Why do we chase perfection?
Why do we want the feeling of
having the exact words
to shape how our experiences exist—
Do we not then pretend that our experiences are
unembodied?
Do we not want to be lost in a fantastic story
precisely because we have struggled too?
Do we not experience our lives as Science Fiction?
Too technical to explain, too human to let go
of our essence.
I think I prefer Science Fiction to Perfection.
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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